Has anyone noticed how ebay is getting worse?
I can't illustrate all of my complaints as I didn't think to take screenshots of the old ebay. Some of my complaints may not apply to ebay in the US or the UK or other territories. But, wherever you are in the world, it seems they just can't resist fiddling with it.
It started probably over a year ago when, upon logging in, the user was invited to try the new ebay or opt out. I took one look and opted out. I suppose it was inevitable that it was a fait accompli, that the decision had already been made.
Once the new ebay was imposed on users, the first thing I noticed was the sidebar that gives you various search options. Instead of displaying the various options with checkboxes, clicking on any one of them now blots out the centre of the page with a panel displaying all the options. When these are selected, the page with those options in the search is then loaded. Now a new page would have been loaded in the old ebay, but it didn't involve doing an uber-cool AJAX thing to show the options; rather, they were already there.
This is just one way that the new ebay forces more page loads on its users. One would have thought that any online business whose servers must come under a big load would be trying to reduce data transfers, but hey, what do I know?
Now, I don't want to wade through a lot of stuff I've seen before. If it was of interest, I'd put it in my Watch List and look at it there. So I always choose to sort items by "Newly listed". The old ebay would remember my search settings between sessions. The new ebay always chooses "Best Match" on the first search of the session—I have to do an extra page load to get "Newly listed".
I'm not sure if the old ebay did this, but the new one does and it sure is annoying. I like to search international listings, so I start in my chosen category (Pro Audio) by searching for something which almost never shows up in local listings... something like "calrec". Usually, the local search returns 0 and ebay helpfully notes that a number of items are availble internationally. So far, so good.
Then I load those international listings and search for whatever I want. Under the search textbox are suggestions: over time, ebay remembers what I've searched for "after" the current search and displays links to those searches. At this point, these are things that I'm looking for from anywhere in the world. But these links do not load international listings; when clicked they load only local listings. I've just been searching international listings and there's a good chance that I'd want to continue doing that. So what's the point of those links? Just more useless crap slowing down the loading of the page.
The latest problem is that ebay does not always load my Watch List. Upon logging, one is presented with a Summary page which includes a list of the ten auctions on my Watch List due to end the soonest. Selecting to look at the Watch List (proper) loads a list of 25 or 50 (or whatever I have previously chosen). That's fine.
Now I regularly review my list and delete items that are either too expensive or which, for some reason or other, I have decided would be frivolous or unnecessary purchases. So I page through and delete those. But after two or three deletions, instead of returning me to the same page of the Watch List (as ebay used to), ebay is now returning to the Summary Page. So now I have to regularly page through my Watch List to get back to where I was.
If you look at View Source in your browser, you'll notice that you don't see the current page nicely marked up with HTML or XHTML. No, just the bare bones of the page are marked up and there is a crap-load of Javascript loading everything else. Well, if you're relying on Javscript to do all the heavy lifting on the client side, ebay, why the hell are you forcing me to endure so many complete page loads rather partial ones that any decent Javascript programmer can pull off with 5 minutes of coding?
Bring the old ebay back.
I just bought—tried to buy—an Audix D6 microphone.
The seller had the wrong address registered with Paypal. So when I tried to pay, nothing happened except for Paypal debiting my credit card. The email address was not registered with Paypal, so the transaction could not be completed. I spent days sending messages to the guy to fix the problem. He didn't.
I wasn't worried because I couldn't get ripped off. But the seller claimed he was (at the time of writing, is) leaving for Asia for a month and wanted to ship the mic. So why didn't he just fix the problem in a reasonable time? I tried four times to pay and each time could not complete it.
To add insult to injury, ebay's autobot accused me of not paying (because the seller had not accepted payment 7 days after the end of the auction). I sent a lengthy message referring them to all the messages sent back and forth and a copy of an email from Paypal showing my payment.
In the end, the guy cancelled the auction, which I hope fixes things with ebay, and relisted ... at a slightly higher price than I paid (US$1.50)— cheeky. It still came in under A$200 so I bought it (again). But what a to do.
If you ever read this, Lance, I don't want bad karma on ebay, so I won't leave a negative rating (if the mic turns up, that is it arrived!), but you're an idiot and I don't want to deal with you again.
Does anyone else think ebay Australia's new summary pages and searching are awful?
I don't have screenshot so I can't illustrate the difference. However, take a look the musical instruments summary page. The "sub-categories" used to be listed with the number of items on offer in each. That was useful because if one noticed that the number of items had fallen, I might decide that there were few, if any, new items to look at. Now I have to open the listings to see the total number of items.
Certain "search" pages have tools to narrow the number of items based on criteria related to the category. This is good. However, the "new" search tools allow the user to choose only one criterion, or to open a "choose more" panel (via an AJAX call). The whole thing is now a lot slower and requires many more page loads than used to be the case.
You'd think ebay would want to reduce the number of page loads per user. After all, fewer page loads means less stress on the servers (or more users before a server crashes).
For example, I'm looking for a new (well, new for me) laptop. Here's the laptop search page. Take a look at the left sidebar with the search tools. Wouldn't it be great if you could select multiple criteria right on that page instead of doing multiple page loads or clicking "Choose more" and then having to click through an AJAX-loaded interface to select your search criteria?
As with everything on the internet, your mileage may vary. I think it sucks.